Tag Archives: Tea Party

Washington (CNN) – Rep. Charles Rangel on Tuesday compared what he considers the most intransigent members of the House Republican caucus with the Confederates of the American Civil War.

The last-minute holdups on a deal over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling, the longtime Democrat from New York City told CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield, are not coming from conflict between Republicans and Democrats.

Rather, “this is all about a handful of people who got elected as Republicans that want to bring down our government. You can see it in the streets. You can see where they’re coming from,” Rangel said.

“The same way they fought as Confederates, they want to bring down the government and reform it.”

Rangel was asked to confirm that he was referring to the Confederates of the Civil War. He told Banfield, “If you take a look at the states that they control, take a look at the Dixiecrats, see how they went over the Republican Party…”

The reasons?

The reaction to Obamacare has nothing to do with race.

Nothing good comes out of incendiary remarks like this.

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The debate is raging in Washington. Can the government spending excess be reigned in. On the one had we have an Obama administration that wants to spend and spend and spend. There can be no doubt as to their desired policy – more government spending is better government spending.

And then you have the Tea Party. Facing opposition not only from the democrats but also from the republican establishment.

And what have they accomplished in their short existence? Look at the graph above.

Policy or philosophy differences aside, the effectiveness of the Tea Party compared to the efforts of a bunch of vagrant criminals. One group is shaping national legislation, the other is “taking too long to respond.”

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There won’t be any direct order found telling the IRS to go hassle Conservative groups. That’s not the way it works. Obama’s style is to “other” groups he does not like, to impugn their motives, and to cast them as pariahs beyond the bounds of civil society. Such and such group, he will say, opposes me not because they have reasonable differences of opinion but because they have nefarious motives. Once a group is labelled and accepted (at least by your political followers) as such, you don’t have to order people to harass them. They just do it, because they see it as the right thing to do to harass evil people. When Joe Nocera writes this in support of Obama in no less a platform as the NY Times, orders are superfluous

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took…

He concludes by saying

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.

There are probably some deeply confused people in the IRS right now — after all they were denying tax exempt status to terrorists, to enemies of America. They should be treated like heroes, and now they are getting all this criticism. So unfair.

Jay Carney mentioned the other day that the White House and Barack Obama is responsible for setting “tone.”

I think that Obama has been clear that the Tea Party is the bad guy. That’s the tone.

On a scale of 1-10, the IRS scandal seems to me about a 3. It is improper to focus on one side’s fundraising groups. An overall examination of supposedly tax-exempt organizations would probably be worthwhile. But they didn’t audit or persecute people; they sent them additional questionnaires.

Recently, nickgb got me thinking that perhaps profiling groups isn’t that bad an idea. In fact, it’s an idea that I have been a proponent of in the gun debate. As such, RR may have a point. Overtly political groups may need to be audited. However, it might be nice if such political groups were audited in equal measure based on their ideology; right and left groups.

However, in RR’s post, he pointed out the fact that there maybe a bigger scandal:

If someone at the IRS actually took confidential information and sent it out, that’s unequivocally a crime.

ProPublica on Monday reported that the same IRS division that targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle provided the investigative-reporting organization with confidential applications for tax-exempt status.

That revelation contradicts previous statements from the agency and may represent a violation of federal guidelines. Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS sector that reviews tax-exemption applications, told a congressional oversight committee in April 2012 that IRS code prohibited the agency from providing information about groups that had not yet been approved.

As an interesting experiment I Googled “ProPublica IRS”:

Not one single major news source on the first page. And when I include “CBSnews” in the search I do get a New York CBS affiliate and, at the bottom, a cbsnews.com story about how the scandals benefits conservatives. And even that story is lifted from Slate.

Anyway, it would seem that we now have a legit scandal. We’ll see if it goes anywhere.

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…hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some seperate sinister entity that’s at the root of all of our problems Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is just around the corner.

You should reject these voices.

Obama is talking about conservatives in general. Republicans in congress and Tea Party republicans in specific.

He is referring to people who feel that we must ever be careful that government is only one day away from becoming a tyrannical mechanism that will restrict liberty. He is referring to people, specific people.

Think those voices need to be rejected now?

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Right now the report is only mentioning Cincinnati. I’m not sure what caused the IRS to review its data or how they determined the discrimination took place, but it sure would be fun to see if they are willing to audit other IRS offices:

(Reuters) – U.S. tax auditors inappropriately targeted applications from conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status, an Internal Revenue Service official acknowledged on Friday.

Lois Lerner, director of the IRS tax-exempt office, said the practice was “was absolutely incorrect and it was inappropriate.”

Lerner, speaking at an American Bar Association conference in Washington, said, “We would like to apologize for that.”

None of the groups that were given extra scrutiny have been rejected yet for tax-exempt status, she said.

Organizations that used the words “patriots” or “Tea Party” in their filings were flagged by the Internal Revenue Service for further review, something conservatives complained about during the 2012 election campaign.

I think it’s important to note that the IRS is reporting, as above, that no group given extra scrutiny has yet been rejected.

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So, I’m just reading around when I came across a Gallup poll on creationism, evolution and who believes in what. I grew up Christian, went to church almost every Sunday for 18 years, Sunday School ’till I graduated high school, sang in the choir and take my kids to church today – though not every Sunday.

I don’t think I can remember ever thinking, when I was old enough to begin to think independently, that God created humans in human form. I certainly NEVER believed that science was wrong. I’ve always accepted that rocks were very old, that people once couldn’t read, write and do the things we can today.

In short, I’ve always felt that evolution was very clearly how we got to where we are today.

So, I’m stunned, freakin’ STUNNED, to learn that a plurality, 46% of American’s, believe that God created humans in current form just 10,000 years ago.

Unbelievable.

The first thing that came to my mind was that it was that group of people that the Left loves to hate; the Tea Party:

Certainly republicans are leading the charge, but not by the margins I would have thought. I mean, 41% of democrats think that God created, what I have to believe, is Adam and Eve in literal form.

Only slightly less surprising is the numbers that support my view that God guided evolution to get us where we are today [I’m not sure that we’re the finished form, by the way. Which may explain my “meh” attitude on supposed crisis like overpopulation and global warming]. I would have thought that as education increased, the view that God guided evolution would decrease:

Nope. In each case, high school, college and then postgraduate, the rate increased supporting God involved evolution.